Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 4 I The writings in this volume date from the beginning of 1912 to the spring of 1914, the two years before Einstein left Zurich for Berlin. While his struggle with the problems of quanta, rather than those of relativity, had dominated his work from 1909 through 1911 (see Volume 3), he was now concentrating his efforts on attempting to construct a relativistic theory of gravitation. Einstein's efforts would finally achieve their goal in the autumn of 1915, when he com- pleted his general theory of relativity. Three scientific manuscripts, printed here for the first time, provide some insight into Einstein's efforts to generalize his original relativity theory into a relativistic theory of gravitation. The first is a review article on the special theory of relativity (Doc. 1); the second consists of notes documenting Ein- stein's research on gravitation as well as the support he received from his friend and former fellow student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), the mathematician Marcel Grossmann (Doc. 10); and the third manuscript con- tains calculations by Einstein in collaboration with Michele Besso, another friend from his student days, on the problem of the motion of the perihelion of Mercury (Doc. 14).[1] The three unpublished manuscripts document the kinds of trials and errors that cannot be reconstructed from Einstein's published papers, and in this way add to our understanding of the creation of general relativity. During the period covered by this volume, Einstein's professional status rose rapidly. As 1912 began, he was professor at the German University of Prague, a relative backwater in scientific research. In the course of that year, however, Einstein declined offers of professorships at the universities of Utrecht and Leyden (where he would have succeeded H. A. Lorentz). He accepted instead a professorship in Zurich, but this time at the ETH rather than the university. [1]The explanation of the observed anomaly of this motion was to become one of the classical tests of general relativity. The existence of the manuscript and the fact that Einstein had exten- sively occupied himself with this subject almost two years before he published on it have been previously unknown. See the editorial note, "The Einstein-Besso Manuscript on the Motion of the Perihelion of Mercury," pp. 344-359, for further discussion.